Rhino Poaching at Record High in South Africa

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Rhinoceros poaching soared to a record high level in South Africa
last year. The country's government said 668 rhinos were killed
within its borders in 2012, up from 448 in 2011, according to the
World Wildlife Fund, an international conservation group.

A whopping 425 of those deaths last year occurred in
Kruger National Park, a top safari destination and home to
South Africa's largest population of both black and white rhinos.
That figure marks a sharp increase from the 252 rhinos killed in
the park in 2011.

The poaching boom is largely due to heightened demand for rhino
horns in Asia, where the grim prizes are believed to have
medicinal properties and are seen as highly desirable status
symbols, especially in Vietnam. TRAFFIC, a nongovernmental global
network that monitors wildlife trade, recently issued a report
describing how some affluent Vietnamese individuals often use the
horn as a hangover
cure and general health tonic, grinding it up and mixing it
with water or alcohol.

"Viet Nam must curtail the nation’s rhino horn habit, which is
fuelling a poaching crisis in South Africa," Sabri Zain,
TRAFFIC's director of advocacy, said in a statement. "Rhinos are
being illegally killed, their horns hacked off and the animals
left to bleed to death, all for the frivolous use of their horns
as a hangover cure."

Last year also saw some crackdowns. Arrests of suspected poachers
and smugglers increased in 2012, with 267 people now facing
rhino-related charges and one Thai man sentenced to a record 40
years in prison for conspiring to smuggle horns to Asia, WWF
officials said. Last month, Vietnam and South Africa also signed
an agreement aimed at strengthening law-enforcement efforts and
sharing intelligence to tackle the illegal wildlife trade.

According to WWF, an additional five rhinos have been killed
since the beginning of 2013, and two men were arrested in
separate incidents in Vietnam and Thailand this month for
smuggling rhino horns.